Sir Alexander Grantham was Governor of Hong Kong from 1947 to 1957, one of the most dramatic decades in the city’s history. This was a time of rapid reconstruction after World War II and growing prosperity. But civil war and revolution in China posed new challenges to the precarious British colony and tested Grantham's skills as a diplomat. In this lively memoir, first published in 1965, Grantham describes his thirty-five years in the British colonial service, which began in Hong Kong with a government cadetship in the 1920s and ended here in 1957.